Yahoo today announced that it’s revamping the way it aggregates news content and in the process launching redesigned commenting, news discovery, and notification features to users on Android, iOS, and through its Yahoo homepage on the web.
The NFL is said to be looking at Apple, Google, Amazon and Yahoo as platform partners for streaming its Thursday night football games according to SportsBusinessDaily:
The league also sent RFPs to several digital companies, like Google, Yahoo, Apple and Amazon, to stream the entire Thursday night schedule on a non-exclusive basis, sources said. The league’s initial plan would have the digital streams serve as a simulcast of the television production — with the same ads and in-game production features. The league expects bidding to start in the low $300M for the television package, with a nominal escalator in year two, sources said.
Yahoo, who is expected to bid, paid $15M to exclusively stream one game this season according to the report so the deal would be a big one. Because the streaming deal would be non-exclusive, the prices would be much lower on a per-game basis. More importantly, the deal would hopefully be the first step into the much larger goal of streaming the whole NFL Season.
Apple TV got the Game Pass service featuring live preseason football games on updated NFL app just four months ago, and now has tvOS as a platform to expand on that.
We know Tim Cook likes his Auburn football and SVP Eddy Cue is a big sports fan so…
Yahoo today released a new “Yahoo Video Guide” app for mobile devices that acts as one central location for users to find content from across a long list of competitive video services and networks.
The app allows users to search from one place and then offers links to buy or start streaming the content in other apps like iTunes, Amazon, Netflix, HBO GO, and many others. So you’ll still need to be a subscriber, have the app downloaded, and or purchase the content once the Yahoo Video Guide app redirects you.
And while you can just search for something you’re looking for, the app also has a Mood Picker feature that lets users pick a from GIFs to search through curated lists.
Yahoo of course has its own Yahoo Screen app for mobile devices, but it also links to content on iTunes, Amazon Video, Hulu, Netflix, HBO GO, ABC, FOX, CBS, NBC, Xfinity, YouTube, A&E, BET, Cartoon Network, Cinemax, Comedy Central, Disney, Food Network, and others. In total it says it’s promoting over 30 video services through the new Video Guide app.
The Yahoo Video Guide iPhone app is available to download for free on the U.S. App Store now.
Yahoo Messenger has long taken a back seat to other Yahoo products on mobile devices, but today the company is finally unveiling a revamped app that brings its messaging platform into this decade with a completely redesigned user experience and new features.
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Today Microsoft is launching a new app called ‘Invite’ that makes scheduling meetings with others easier. The app is arriving first for iPhone and iPad users in the US and Canada with more platforms and locations to follow.
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Yahoo is planning a mid-week press event to reveal a new messaging app, according to a report from Re/code. The event was originally speculated to be related to a new version of the Tumblr or Flickr apps, but Re/code’s Kara Swisher noted that it will instead be related to a new messaging endeavour.
Yahoo announced today that a few of its services will no longer be support on older Macs and iOS devices. The changes will impact Yahoo Mail with Apple’s built-in Mail app on older iPhones, iPads, and iPod touches, and Yahoo Contact syncing on Macs running older versions of the desktop operating system. The changes will take place later this month on June 15th.
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Three years after Apple launched its own iOS Maps app to replace Google as its iPhone and iPad map provider, the Cupertino company is readying its first major enhancements to the service. While Apple was known to be gearing up for the launch of a mass transit directions service this fall in a handful of cities, sources have revealed that it is also developing its first entirely in-house mapping database to reduce its reliance on TomTom, using a fleet of mysterious vans to take still photos of business storefronts to replace Yelp photos, and building a 3D Street View feature. Apple has been using the sensor-equipped vans in cities such as Los Angeles, Dallas, and New York since earlier this year, and, below, we detail how the vehicles are advancing Apple’s plans for the future of Maps…
With more than 3,000 apps for the Apple Watch already on the App Store for Apple’s new device, two major analytics platforms today announced support for Apple Watch apps through their respective SDKs.
Yahoo shared that its Mobile Developer Suite has added support for Apple Watch app analytics for developers at no cost through Flurry Analytics, the platform it acquired almost a year ago. By implementing Yahoo’s analytics system, developers of Apple Watch apps gain access to several metrics…
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Yahoo today announced its plans to bring four of its apps to Apple Watch in time for the device’s April 24th launch date.
Yahoo is planning to update its Yahoo Weather, Yahoo Sports Fantasy, Yahoo News Digest, and Yahoo News Hong Kong apps with support for Apple’s new wearable, today giving a first look at the experience.
The company provided a breakdown of what you can expect to see on your Apple Watch with each of the apps:
Here’s a look at the News Digest and News Hong Kong apps:
You can expect updates to the Yahoo Weather, Yahoo Sports Fantasy, Yahoo News Digest, and Yahoo News Hong Kong apps by April 24th.
More details about the upcoming biography Becoming Steve Jobs have been revealed through the book’s preview on Amazon (which has since been cut down significantly), revealing several interesting tidbits about the Apple co-founder’s life that were previously unknown (via Cult of Mac).
One example is a story about an offer then-COO Tim Cook made to Jobs when the latter was battling cancer. Cook says that he discovered he shared a blood type with Jobs and decided to undergo numerous medical tests before offering to donate part of his liver to the executive.
Since Satya Nadella took the reins from Steve Ballmer just over a year ago, Microsoft has been on an aggressive acquisition spree of cross platform apps and services. Most recently, the company bought the iOS email app Acompli then relaunched it as Outlook for iOS. Microsoft also bought Sunrise, the popular calendar software with an iOS app.
Aside from Microsoft and Apple, other interested buyers include or included Facebook, Google, and Yahoo (anyone missing?). Competing with Apple’s TestFlight acquisition last year, Microsoft even bought the beta distribution service Hockeyapp at the end of last year.
Adding to its list of recent mobile app acquisitions, TechCrunch reports that Microsoft is now eyeing Prismatic, a social recommendation network with apps for both iOS and Android. Prismatic describes itself as a personalized and social news reader.
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After announcing its first dev con last December, Yahoo today kicked off its mobile developer conference in San Francisco where it unveiled five new products for mobile app makers. As suspected, Yahoo revealed the latest tools from Flurry, the mobile ad and analytics firm it acquired last July.
This includes Flurry Analytics Explorer, a new dashboard for the Flurry Analytics system which it says enables developers to discover more insights with than before, and Flurry Pulse, which lets app builders “share app signals with partners using their existing Flurry SDK implementations and the click of a button.”
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We learned earlier this week that Tim Cook would be speaking at a White House cybersecurity summit today, and it now appears he will be the only tech CEO to do so. USNews is reporting that CEOs of other top tech companies all declined President Obama’s invitation, sending lower-ranking execs in their place.
Unlike Apple’s Cook, other top executives at key Silicon Valley companies declined invitations to the summit. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer and Google’s Larry Page will not attend amid the ongoing concerns about government surveillance. Facebook spokesman Jay Nancarrow said Zuckerberg is unavailable to attend and that Chief Security Officer Joe Sullivan will speak during a panel at the event.
It’s believed other CEOs consider refusing to take part to be the best way to express their objections to increased government surveillance of electronic communications, while Cook takes the opposite view: that it is important to speak up in defence of user privacy …
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The Yahoo app for iPhone is getting a new look today that the company says puts a bigger focus on magazine content with “beautiful images and engaging features that make content from our ten digital magazines even more fun.”
New features included in the redesigned app to make the magazine experience more interactive include the ability to vote on Yahoo Style, swipe to see Yahoo Movies info including reviews and analysis, and content from Yahoo Food.
You’ll notice the new features mentioned above in all the magazine categories in the app and Yahoo also notes that it now has “Yahoo Weather and Yahoo News Digest content above the stream for your two favorite categories, All Stories and News.”
The updated Yahoo app for iPhone is arriving on the App Store today for users in the United States.
Contract workers driving shuttle buses for Apple, eBay, Yahoo and other Silicon Valley companies have voted to unionize, reports USA Today.
A majority of the 120 full-time and part-time drivers who transport those companies’ employees have signed authorization cards with the union, said Rome Aloise, International vice president and secretary-treasurer of Teamsters Local 853.
The drivers are employed by South San Francisco-based Compass Transportation, which has contracts with Apple and the other firms to transport its workers to and from work.
The vote follows a call by Jesse Jackson for Tim Cook to create “world-class working conditions” for low-paid contractors. Cook subsequently met with Jackson to discuss income and diversity issues ahead of a small protest which briefly entered the lobby of the Apple campus.
Although the hourly rates for the drivers range from $18-20, they argue that high living costs make it difficult to live close to work, and working further out does not allow them to return home between split shifts in the morning and evening–meaning they are effectively at work for far longer than their paid hours.
William Gould, a professor at Stanford Law School said: “These workers, as a practical matter, have to wait in certain areas to do their work (and) they are not compensated for that wait.”
Facebook shuttle bus drivers joined the Teamsters union in November.
Photo: wired.com
Yahoo has released an updated version of its Yahoo Mail app for iPhone and with it comes the ability to track packages for online purchases without leaving the app. The feature arrives as the latest addition in Yahoo’s mission to integrate some of its other key services— news, weather, magazines— as features in its Mail app.
The package tracking feature works for online purchases through a long list of popular retailers (but not all) and appears in the app’s Today view:
Tracking online shopping purchases can be tricky. To make your life a little bit easier, we’re adding package notifications to the latest release of the Yahoo Mail app for iOS in the U.S. Now, you can view and track shipped packages in the “Yahoo Today” section of the app from sites including Amazon, eBay, Zappos, Target, Best Buy, Macys.com and more. We’ll notify you when your package has shipped, when it’s scheduled to arrive, and what’s in your shipment.
In addition, the updated app gains the ability to customize the Today view, horoscopes, flight notification support from Orbitz and CheapTickets, and more:
We even added the much-requested ability to sort and select the type of content in your “Today” section to make it even more personalized. By clicking on the gear icon on the top left corner, you will see a new “Edit Yahoo Today” option for you to pick and choose what you’d like to see, including News Digest, Sports, Weather, Horoscope, Finance, Screen and Flickr.
The updated Yahoo Mail app, version 3.2.12, is available on the App Store now
Yahoo announced an update to its Yahoo iOS app today that adds local news, commenting, and UI tweaks to the company’s app for accessing news and other Yahoo services.
Want to know more about what’s going on around you? Today we’re bringing local news to your fingertips with the Yahoo App. As you move around the country, you’ll be able to see what’s going on in your area.
In addition to local news stories for users in the US, readers now have the ability to comment on articles:
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Yahoo announced today that it will be hosting its first ever developer conference, The Yahoo Mobile Developer Conference, early next year in February. Yahoo confirmed it plans to use the event to unveil a new suite of developer tools for mobile apps that will “help developers better understand their users and improve, grow and monetize their apps.”
Today, Americans spend more time on their smartphones than watching TV – making the mobile experience, and the job of mobile developers, more important than ever. Join us as we announce a suite of tools that will help mobile developers better understand their users and improve, grow and monetize their apps… Breakout sessions will help developers solve some of the biggest issues they’re facing in today’s crowded app market.
Yahoo didn’t give many clues regarding what exactly those tools will include, but it did say that VP of Flurry products, the mobile analytics and advertising company that it acquired earlier this year, will appear at the event with a “State of Mobile address.” It’s likely we’ll see the latest solutions from the Flurry team since joining Yahoo. Currently the company offers analytics services for tracking app performance and a mobile app advertising platform for both advertisers and publishers.
Developers and others interested in learning more about The Yahoo Mobile Developer Conference scheduled for Feb. 19, 2015 in San Francisco can sign up here for updates.
Last week Mozilla announced that its Firefox browser would be dropping Google as the default search engine in favor of Yahoo. While it’s a good move for Yahoo, it won’t gain the company the exposure that comes with being the default search engine on something more widely used, such as Apple’s Safari browser on iOS devices.
That position has been held by Google since the iPhone’s launch in 2007, but the agreement that made the Mountain View-based company the default site for all of Safari’s searches will expire next year, and The Information reports that Yahoo and Microsoft’s Bing are both vying for the spot.
Apple has just released Safari 7.1 to all users of OS X Mavericks following several beta releases in recent weeks. The update adds DuckDuckGo as a default search engine option, which was also just added to Apple’s mobile version of Safari alongside iOS 8. The update also includes a security improvement for Yahoo search engine users: Apple says Yahoo searches from the search field are now encrypted.
In addition, Apple notes the release improves Reader and AutoFill compatibility with websites.
The release follows OS X 10.9.5 becoming available to all users yesterday with Safari 7.0.6. The Safari 7.1 update is available to users on OS X Mavericks 10.9.5 now through Updates in the Mac App Store.
In a flurry of updates today, Amazon Cloud Drive and Sony’s Music Unlimited service have received updates for their respective streaming services. Amazon Cloud Drive adds AirPlay support for photo and video streaming to Apple TV, as well as exposing more metadata information in the UI. You can now also rename albums, although this is iPhone only for reasons unknown.
Sony has given its Music Unlimited app a big overhaul. The app has been modernized with iOS 7’s aesthetics, featuring sharp imagery and flat iconography. The team have also dedicated significant time in improving performance, to minimize the sluggishness customers complained about in previous versions. You can also edit playlists right from the app, a critical improvement for a music app.
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Yahoo updated its Mail app today for iPhone and iPad with a new and improved search experience that makes it easier to find emails and specific content within emails when searching for contacts.
With the updated app, users can now apply filters after searching for a contact that will filter results by emails, photos, or files. The update will make it easy to, for example, find a specific attachment within an email or conversation.
The update also includes unspecified performance improvements and bug fixes.
The updated Yahoo Mail app for iPhone and iPad, version 3.2.0, is available now for free.
What’s New in Version 3.2.0
– We’re excited to introduce you to our new and improved search experience. Now, when you search for a person’s name, you can easily filter the results by emails, photos, or files. We hope you love it as much as we do! Please drop us a note at aerogram-feedback@yahoo-inc.com with your thoughts or suggestions.
– Performance improvements
– Bug fixes
Yahoo has released a new version of its Finance app for iPhone and iPad featuring the addition of a new tab bar for quicker navigation and other visual changes. The update still features the basement view on the left as well as the search view for adding stocks to your watch list on the right, but the overall app is organized much cleaner now.
The new tab bar consists of the primary Home view for information related to stocks you’re tracking, a new News tab for following general finance news and information, and a Markets view for an overview of U.S., Europe, and Asia finance data.
The updated version of Yahoo Finance also adds support for viewing pre-market and after-market data for items on your watch list. Yahoo Finance 2.2 for iPhone and iPad is available on the App Store.
